Piecing a Scene Together

I featured this photograph in a previous post. It was heavily circulated over the weekend and purported to be a Basij joining the demonstrators. Now that more images have come out of Iran, I have been able to piece together the scene better.

We heard a lot about armed forces refusing to shoot at protesters, and some apparently joined the crowds. We saw evidence of this in June in rare video footage so it wasn’t that surprising to hear of it now. The picture at left was hailed as evidence of defections, but after piecing together some images and video, a lot of doubt creeps in. For one, it is possible the man pictured is a protester dressed in a Basij uniform, or, that given the circumstances, the Basij man pretended to defect in order to spare his life which looked as though it might directly be in danger.

First of all, the image above is cropped, and it’s part of a scene we saw a great deal of over the weekend, see below:

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